Filming of the movie version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book, Memoria de mis Putas Tristes, has been halted in Mexico due to a lawsuit brought by The Regional Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean that says that the film will promote pedophilia.

“As a book, it does not have access to the most vulnerable people in society,” Coalition director Teresa Ulloa told The Associated Press. “Once they make the movie, it will be in movie theaters and later it will surely be on television.”

According to the film’s co-director and producer, Ricardo del Rio, the lawsuit led to government officials in the Mexican state of Puebla withdrawing funding.

I’ve read Marquez’s book and can understand the concern of grassroots organizations in Mexico, especially when put into the context of the violence against girls and women in Juarez for example.
Certainly the millions of dollars it costs to produce a film could be used to help solve these horrific crimes and considering how poor the film adaptation of Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera was, the expense may not be worth it. But this made me think on La Macha’s posts on Roman Polanski, especially the one about all the Latin Americans and Hispanics in the film industry have gone out of their way to help Polanski evade consequences after he raped a 13 year old girl. Is a disgusting criminal reality more worthy of defense than work of fiction? Or should we consciously struggle against the fact and the fantasy that is the violent sexual assault of women?

I like Jay Smooth’s video post on the Polanski case.

Via / The Miami Herald